7. Defining Your Brand Story and Content Narrative

“Tweetable Moment: Brands can’t wait around for news to happen before creating content. They should have a story and tell it consistently.”

—#nextmediaco

For example, when Red Bull sponsors the X games, they don’t just post large banners throughout the event with their logo plastered all over it. Instead, they capitalize on their story and build a snow ramp for Olympic Gold Medalist and professional snowboarder Shaun White. And when that wasn’t enough, they helped Felix Baumgartner skydive from outer space as a part of the Red Bull Stratos project. In October 2012, Baumgartner flew approximately 24 miles into the stratosphere over New Mexico in a helium balloon before free falling in a pressure suit and then parachuting to back to Earth. The total jump, from leaving the capsule to landing on the ground, lasted about 10 minutes.

Sounds epic to me.

Red Bull Stratos was a huge win with over eight million people watching the event online and seven million people engaging with the content in various social media channels. For the month following the space jump, anytime someone talked about space or space travel, the conversation inherently included a mention of Red Bull. They owned the conversation. And months later, when a dad launched his son’s Skylanders Tree Rex action figure into space, Red Bull jumped in with words of encouragement. @RedBullStratos spotted the conversation on Twitter and joined in on the celebration, tweeting, “Tree Rex needs his wings too.”

In a 2012 Fast Company interview, Red Bull founder and CEO Dietrich Mateschitz talked about the transition from his brand becoming a media company. In the beginning, he said, when the company first launched Red Bull, a product that stimulated body and mind, the message was more about the roots of where the product came from. Today and after 20 years, it’s now called adventure sports, extreme sports, and outdoor sports.

When asked what the Red Bull brand stands for, his response sheds clarity on how brand storytelling and the content narrative has evolved from just company history, product announcements, and traditional marketing messages:

What Red Bull stands for is that it “gives you wings...” which means that it provides skills, abilities, and power to achieve whatever you want to. It is an invitation as well as a request to be active, performance-oriented, alert, and to take challenges. When you work or study, do your very best. When you do sports, go for your limits. When you have fun or just relax, be aware of it and appreciate it.

Notice that Mateschitz’s response has nothing to do with the actual product. This story works for Red Bull. They are using the “gives you wings...” messaging to enable athletes, students, and just about anyone else to experience life to the fullest, be adventurous and enjoy every minute of it. And Red Bull is executing this message flawlessly across every form of media.

Red Bull’s narrative has evolved over the last 20 years. It didn’t start out talking about extreme sports. The company has adapted over the years to deliver a message that resonates with its target customers, which is one reason why Red Bull leads in the energy drink category. They have a good story and it’s that simple.

Red Bull might be the exception to the rule, but as you think about your story and how you want to tell it, you must consider several internal and external inputs before you can establish a narrative that resonates with consumers.

Figure 7.1 is an example of the various inputs needed to craft your content narrative.

Each of these inputs must be carefully analyzed and thought through before your content narrative is established to ensure you are telling the right story.

A brand is a product, service, or concept that is publicly distinguished from other products, services, or concepts so that it can be easily communicated and usually marketed. A brand name is the name of the distinctive product, service, or concept. Branding is the process of creating and disseminating the brand name. Branding can be applied to the entire corporate identity as well as to individual product and service names.

For the most part, and there are certainly exceptions, brands are often expressed and communicated in the form of logos, campaigns, and other creative executions. Red Bull has obviously turned this definition completely upside down. In the technology industry, a more recent example of this is Intel’s extension of “Intel Inside,” a creative brand initiative that differentiated Intel from its competitors and helped them engage in a direct conversation with consumers, essentially bypassing their channel partners. What started out as a clever campaign has become a core part of Intel’s brand position.

There are five key elements that make up holistic brand strategy:

• Brand Position: Describes what your company does and for whom it does it, what your unique value proposition is, and how a customer will benefit from using your product or service. For example, when you think of Wal-Mart, you might imagine low cost products. That is their brand position. And if you are in the market for a new car and safety is your number one concern, you might consider purchasing a Volvo. They own that positioning.

• Brand Promise: The single most important thing that your company promises to deliver to its customers—at every single touch point. To decide what that is, consider what customers, employees, and partners should expect from every possible interaction with you. Every business and marketing decision should be weighed against this promise to be sure that it fully reflects that promise or at the very least it does not contradict it (for example, Nordstrom’s promise to deliver exceptional customer service or Southwest Airline’s promise of convenience when booking/changing flight plans).

• Brand Personality: Illustrates what your company wants its brand to be known for. Think about specific personality traits you want prospects, clients, employees, and partners to use to describe your company and brand. Consider well-known weight loss program, Weight Watchers. Of course their business model is selling weight loss solutions, programs, consulting, and diets. But their brand personality is selling empowerment and empathy. Many of their corporate spokespeople like Jennifer Hudson express this sentiment in television commercials and online video advertisements.

• Brand Story: Illustrates your company’s history, along with how the history adds value and credibility to your brand. It should include a summary of your products or services. A great example of this is what Google did for Chrome. They released a video of a dad keeping a journal about his daughter, Sophie Lee, from before she was born and then highlighting her life milestones—first birthday, crying, laughing, becoming a big sister, and much more. The video concludes with Google’s suite of products circulating and showcasing how their products can help you “the customer” tell this same story.

• Brand Associations: The specific physical artifacts that make up your brand. This is your name, logo, colors, taglines, fonts, imagery, and so on. Your brand associations must reflect all that you promise to your stakeholders.

There is an old saying that is still relevant today: “Features tell, benefits sell.” Well, despite its age and the fact that I am probably dating myself, it’s still true today and is an integral part of your storytelling initiatives. I am sure you remember buying your first laptop. The sales rep over at Best Buy was most likely explaining something along the lines of “This ultrabook is equipped with Windows 8; it has an Intel Core I7 64-bit processor; it has full HD with a 15.6" screen; it comes equipped with 8GB of memory and a 500GB 1600 MHz DDR3 hard drive with Intel Smart Response Technology.”

Unless you know about laptops or consider yourself a technology enthusiast, none of this technical jargon matters to you. What you want to know is how it will benefit your life. Questions like “How fast is it?” “Can I watch high definition movies and browse Facebook at the same time?” or “How many photos and videos can I store on it?” are more important. So as you think about your content narrative, consider the brand, the products, and what they promise to deliver to you customers. These are all extremely important.

What’s unique about TOMS, if you remember from Chapter 1, “Understanding the Social Customer and the Chaotic World We Live In,” is that when they sell a pair of shoes, another pair of shoes is given to an impoverished child; and when TOMS sells a pair of eyewear, part of the profit is used to save or restore the eyesight for people in developing countries such as Argentina, Cambodia, Haiti, and the United States. In a recent interview on Treehugger.com, the founder of TOMS Shoes, Blake Mycoskie, goes on record to explain his inspiration for starting the company.

I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve started five companies in the last 12 years, mainly in media and technology. I was just kind of burned out. I went down to Argentina looking for some time to relax, experience the culture, take it all in. I spent a couple of weeks doing that. In the process, I met some expats that were down there doing some really great social work in some of the villages on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. I asked them if I could tag along.

I’m always looking for new experiences. When I went with them to one village in particular, I noticed that most of the children did not have shoes and that if they did have shoes, they had a shoe that was way too big, or duct-taped, or a flip-flop with a hole in it. It just shocked me to some degree. Shoes aren’t that expensive, so why don’t they have shoes? And even more so, after I stopped a few of the kids and looked at their feet, they had cuts. They had hookworm. They had infections.

He goes on to talk about the implications of not having shoes in some of these countries.

I would say that there are really three things that you find. Number one is just that having shoes helps someone with their personal security and understanding. It gives them self-worth. It shows that they’re valued. It’s almost a sense of wealth in these communities. It almost becomes a passport into other things that are very important. School, for instance, is probably the easiest example. A lot of kids cannot go to school unless they have a proper uniform, and a proper uniform includes shoes.

So, literally, I’ve met thousands of families that the first thing they say to us when we give them shoes is, “Oh my God, my kid will now get to go to school.” That’s a big deal. To think that there are schools with open seats in the developing world that don’t allow kids to come in because they don’t have a pair of shoes. To me, it’s just ridiculous. But that’s just the custom that they have. So giving them a pair of shoes allows education.

In Blake’s case, he built his entire business model on helping others, and everything you see online—TOMS.com, Twitter, Facebook, paid advertising, and various customer conversations deliver on this powerful message. This is what TOMS stands for.

Your company’s business model might not be rooted in philanthropy, but most likely, your brand is involved in some type of corporate responsibility or citizenship. Issues around sustainability, energy efficiency, poverty, or human trafficking should be considered to be a part of your content narrative in some way.

If your company does not have a corporate social responsibility program, perhaps that should be considered—and not just for the sake of storytelling. It’s just the right thing to do.

If you scan the media headlines about Tesla, you will see a wide array of different headlines. As discussed in Chapter 3, “Establishing a Centralized ‘Editorial’ Social Business Center of Excellence,” there was a negative review of the Model S written by New York Times reporter John Broder in February 2013 titled, “Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway.” More recent headlines include

“Sarah Palin echoes Romney: Tesla Motors ‘losers’ who build ‘bricks’”: In this article, Sarah Palin commented on a Facebook post saying that Tesla Motors was launched after receiving a loan from the Department of Energy but has since been plagued with problems and laid off 75% of its workforce.

“Facing opposition from auto groups, Tesla looks to change Texas law so it can sell cars in the state”: In this article, it appears as if Tesla Motors is in a legal squabble with the state of Texas. They are facing opposition from the state’s auto dealers association who want to stop Tesla from selling, delivering, and servicing its vehicles in the state of Texas.

“Tesla expects its first-ever profit”: In this CNN article, Tesla Motors is expecting to report its first-ever quarterly profit after sales of its all-electric Model S exceeded expectations and that the announcement about the just-ended first quarter pushed Tesla Motors (TSLA) shares nearly 16% higher.

There are hundreds of articles written every day about companies, brands, CEOs, products, and services. Gaining insight into how the media talks about and perceives your brand is important. I am not referring to the sentiment of the conversation or volume of conversation. These are certainly important but aren’t the focus of your narrative. I am talking about the context in which they talk about your brand. It will either help you craft a message that resonates with the media or validate that your current narrative is actually working.

In the Tesla example, the above CNN article states, “The company is sticking with the larger 60-kilowatt hour battery pack option, with a range closer to 230 miles. That model sells for $62,400 after a $7,500 federal tax credit.” The interesting thing about this is that “tax credit” saving message is very much a part of the way that Tesla persuades buyers to purchase the car, both on the company website as well as when you visit the sales center. In fact, they calculate the purchase price based on that savings even though it’s more of a rebate than a discount taken at the time of purchase.

Let’s build on the Tesla example. I went to their Facebook page to see how their fans were “reacting” to the content on the page. Again, not necessarily looking at the sentiment or engagement, but more to understand the way they talk to and about the brand. The Tesla Motors community manager recently shared an article about the opening of 20 service centers in Raleigh Durham, North Carolina. A quick scan of the Facebook comments show that their customers are excited naturally, saying “No wonder it was the unanimous car of the year...beauty, power, sophistication, and non-polluting...all in one machine” and “I’d add +1 to that group if I had the means to buy a Tesla. I’m a Leaf owner in Raleigh though, so I’m still helping to push EV adoption here.”

I then clicked over to the article on WalterMagazine.com to get more context and get a better idea of how the writer perceived and talked about Tesla. Seeing the commentary in the actual article gave additional insight:

That cherry on top is no joke. Model S owner Otto Kumbar insisted on nudging Walter into the driver’s seat of his new car, and while there’s no mistaking the Tesla’s style, it’s the instantaneous, rocket-like zoom that erupts with a tap on the pedal—zero-to-60 in four seconds—that could make an eco-warrior out of anyone. (“It’s So Easy Being Green When Your Ride Looks Like This”).

I then did quick search of “Tesla Motors” in Twitter, which gives even more insight into the way the community is talking about the brand.

• @azizonomics Electric cars economically unviable? Nope. Tesla Motors just made a first quarterly profit.

• @drgrist Can we please have electric cars NOT rely on sexist advertising? RT @TeslaMotors Chick Magnet.

• @hunterwalk Imagine @TeslaMotors-operated drive-in movie theaters in LA, SF for Tesla owner meetups. C’mon @elonmusk, make it happen!

• @amandatapping Voila le Tesla!! Totally electric. Totally fun, gorgeous and fast. Loving it! @TeslaMotors!! Xo

And last, in response to the article where Sarah Palin was quoted, there is a tweet directly from Mr. Elon Musk himself:

• @elonmusk Sarah Palin calls Tesla a loser. Am deeply wounded. Btw, Model S warranty does cover “bricking.”

• @IshanShah Keep up the good work @TeslaMotors! Palin=trolling. @elonmusk: “Sarah Palin calls Tesla a loser...Btw, Model S warranty does cover bricking.”

Again, the purpose of this analysis is not to track sentiment, conversation volume, or community engagement. It’s to get a better understanding of the community and “how” they talk or refer to the brand. Does that context match Tesla’s content narrative or brand positioning? Or does it provide insight that would influence how Tesla creates content? In some cases, it might make an impact, and other times it might not prove to be as valuable.

MicroStrategy is one of the largest vendors of business intelligence software, competing with products such as SAP Business Objects and IBM Cognos for reporting and analysis of data. In 2012, they launched their Wisdom Application that takes Facebook data to the next level. Their application makes it simple to drill down into information shared by millions of Facebook fans. Currently the application has data from about five million people, and MicroStrategy says that it’s growing by about 100,000 people a day. The app has two main functions. The first allows you to analyze and compare the information from almost half a billion Facebook Page Likes. The second provides you detailed statistics about your personal Facebook network.

Their enterprise product lets you access and analyze big data from a variety of sources and provides them in several analytical views based on demographics, psychographics, check-in locations, and interest. Figure 7.2 shows all the data points that Wisdom can provide to you.

Also if you work directly with Facebook, you can request the Connection Analysis Report that provides a deeper look into the demographics and psychographics of your fan base. These insights can help you to determine how well your brand is connecting with your customers on Facebook and understand deeper insights into what they are interested in. The report details specific demographic data, how your fans access the page (mobile, which device, and so on), as well as what other brand pages your fans also like.

Similar to the Wisdom application for Facebook, Demographics Pro can help you get a better understanding of your Twitter followers. CEO Paul Hallett describes his product as the “Nielsen for Twitter,” which can give you a detailed demographic and psychographic breakdown of your Twitter followers. I ran my Twitter account through the product and received the following summary at the beginning of a 27-page detailed report:

@Britopian’s followers are in their early thirties, typically married with high income. The account has a noteworthy audience concentration in San Francisco.

Professionally, @Britopian’s followers are employed as senior managers, customer service professionals, entrepreneurs, HR professionals, and consultants. The account ranks within the top 10% of all Twitter accounts in terms of density of sales/marketing managers.

In their spare time they enjoy beer, political news, nightlife/partying, wine, and yoga. People following @Britopian are charitably generous, environmentally aware, and health conscious. Sports that rise most notably above Twitter norm include hockey, cycling, and skiing.

As consumers they are relatively affluent and fashion conscious, with spending focused most strongly on nightlife/entertainment, technology, and wining/dining. Main street brand affiliations far stronger than Twitter average include Morton’s Steakhouse, Trader Joe’s, Caribou Coffee, Pei Wei, and Capital Grille.

I never knew that I attracted beer-drinking politicos who also enjoy yoga and partying.

Although this data is certainly helpful, it’s important to remember that it should also be considered one of several inputs that will help deliver your content narrative.

Seattle-based Simply Measured provides deep analytics when researching your brand’s Twitter followers as well. The following example is a report analyzing Starwood Preferred Guest’s (SPG) Twitter account. As illustrated in Figure 7.3, the platform analyzes the top keywords within your followers’ profile descriptions. In this example, 9% of SPG’s followers have “travel” listed in their profiles. This shouldn’t be all too surprising because SPG owns several hotels—The W, Westin, Sheraton, and ALoft. What is interesting, though, is that 3% have “music” and “business” listed in their profiles. Though these percentages are fairly low, it might prove to be an opportunity to create more business and/or music-focused content.

Simply Measured also surfaces the top keywords within tweets. In the following example and analyzing Jet Blue’s Twitter account, 18% of Jet Blue’s followers are also mentioning “flight” followed by “#JetBlueApp” at 11%, “Ipad” at 7%, and “giving” at 6%. In this case, it would be smart to get a better understanding of some of the tweets that mention “flight” specifically, as this could be a customer service issue or current customers complaining about the brand for some reason. And it’s quite possible that the “giving” keyword could be associated with a campaign of some sort, perhaps a partnership with a cause-related organization. Figure 7.4 illustrates the breakdown of the top keywords associated with the tweets that also mention Jet Blue.

And finally, Simply Measured also integrates with Influencer Platform, Klout. This integration enables you to see influence scores for all of your followers. More importantly, it breaks down the topics within which your followers are influential. Figure 7.5 shows all of Time Warner Cable’s followers based on their topics of influence. For example, 12% of their followers are influential about photography.

Simply Measured can give you basic engagement data such as average “Likes, comments, and shares,” top performing posts, reach and impressions, and community growth metrics in Facebook, but they also provide you with the engagement numbers by time, day, and content type. There are several takeaways about data like this. One is that it will help you get smarter about day parting your content and answer questions like, “Is it more effective to post on Monday mornings at 9:00 AM PST or Friday afternoons at 4:00 PM PST?”

Second, the data sheds some light about which types of content are the most effective—video, photos, general status updates, or posts with/without links. This is important because as you build your content narrative and decide how you want to tell your brand story, this data gives you insight as to how you want to execute it and in which media type.

So the question is, how can you capitalize on understanding how people search for information in Google? Well, it just so happens that Google gives you this information for free. If you go to https://adwords.google.com and search for any keyword, it provides a report and tells you how many people, globally and locally, search for that specific keyword in a given month. It also gives you other, similar keywords and their corresponding search volume numbers.

Using the tool, I did a search for “makeup and acne.” I explain why in the next section. Figure 7.6 shows that there are several thousand searches per month for that and similar keywords. Specifically, 33,000 people search for this every month, globally. This is valuable to you as you think about your content narrative. You never want to create content just for the search engines, but it’s good to understand how people are searching for information, especially if you work for a makeup manufacturer in this case.

It’s also helpful to see how people search for your brand, specifically. Do they spell it correctly? What other terms are they associating with your brand? This data can give you a frame of reference into consumer behavior when they type your brand name into the search bar.

Understanding how and what consumers are searching for in Google will give you direction on the how you execute your content marketing initiatives, specifically when writing long-form content.

What’s great about this tool is that it bridges that gap between a branded Lithium community (generally hosted on a brand’s website) and brand pages on Facebook. Lithium uses Q&A boards, discussion forums, and search capabilities within their Facebook apps so that posts appear in both places, creating seamless conversations across both ecosystems. This is important because when a user asks/responds to a question in Facebook, it’s dynamically updated on the branded site (and vice versa). This means that all the Q&A that happens within Facebook is not only game for Graph Search, but will also be indexed in Google. Win-win, if you ask me.

If you take a look at the Sephora Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/Sephora) and click Beauty Advice, you’ll see a form that allows you to ask a question or search the community for specific answers. This experience is powered by Lithium. I typed in “makeup and acne,” and a drop-down menu of several conversations appeared. I clicked one thread “Do makeup primers aggravate acne?” and saw that there were about seven answers from others in the community giving their specific points of view. I then went to Google and searched for “does makeup aggravate acne,” and the same conversation appeared in Google, specifically in the fourth position in the search results. Clicking the link took me to Sephora’s Lithium branded community and specifically the same thread I came across in Facebook.

Using a tool such as Lithium’s Social Web can help solve customer problems quickly and efficiently. It can also provide insight into what is bothering your customers so that you can create content around these issues and dominate Google at the same time. This tactic can also decrease calls into your call center if done right since many people search Google for answers before dialing customer service.

It’s also good practice to use video when creating customer support content. The number one search term in YouTube is “how to,” and it’s the perfect opportunity for you to create proactive videos that answer questions your customers are asking about (such as how to unscrew a stripped screw). Home improvement retailer, Lowe’s, used Vine (six-second video social network owned by Twitter) to create six-second tutorials for their customers on this very topic.

What’s important to realize is that most social content—specifically tweets and Facebook status updates—do not appear in Google’s search results. So when you think about creating and using video content, think YouTube and other types of long-form content.

Obviously, you have to take into consideration your brand and what it stands for. Skipping this step would be a huge miss, and you could find yourself creating and sharing content that doesn’t align to your business goals. The nonbusiness issues might or might not play a role, depending on the size and culture of your company. But it would be a good idea to go through the exercise and understand if your brand is involved in corporate responsibility initiatives. Getting a firm understanding of how others talk about you is extremely important, whether it be the media, bloggers, or your customers.

Understanding their interests and passion points allows you to relate to them on a more personal level. Historical content performance is important as it will inform your channel strategy and give you insight into the types of content that delivers the most engagement and value. Search behavior helps you shape how you talk about your products, brand, and the value proposition that you deliver to your customers. Last, customer service can be much more than just responding to and answering customer questions online. By understanding your customer pain points, you can create content that aligns to those pain points, capitalizes on search, and potentially decreases calls coming into your call center.

After you gather all of this data, you need to collaborate with your internal stakeholders and prepare for a content innovation exercise. Depending on the size of your company, this could take one week or several weeks. But the goal of this exercise is to come to a collaborative decision on how you want to tell your story. You need to prioritize the importance of each of the content inputs and plot each one by the goals of your brand, the strategic importance of each, and your operational capabilities to execute.

Assuring that you get all of your internal stakeholders involved is imperative to the success of your content strategy. If you work for a small company or have a limited budget, you might not be able to execute a fully robust content strategy. You might only have the time, budget, and capabilities to focus on the top three content initiatives and build from there. However, going through the exercise just described will prove to be valuable to you in the long run.

Part of this exercise is also determining what your brand’s tone of voice will be, specifically within social channels. For example, the following is one way this can be crafted if your brand is a clothing manufacturer or retailer:

• Approachable: Your brand is fun, easy to talk to, and answers questions even when they may not make complete sense. Your brand is a friend to all and gives good advice to those customers who seek fashion advice. You brand is not the fashion police and believes that everyone is beautiful even if their clothes may not match.

• Fun/Humorous: Your brand will never sound like a robot or share corporate gibberish. Going shopping is fun and you should have fun when talking about it. Your brand is clever, witty, and makes people smile.

• Smart: Your brand is a subject matter expert in all things fashion. No room for error when it comes to talking about important things in life, like making your customers look and feel good in some new threads.

• Enthusiastic: Your brand must strive to get customers excited and pumped for life events and milestones such as bachelor parties, anniversaries, back to school, or girls’ night out.

Keep in mind that your brand’s tone of voice should be unique to your brand’s core values, culture, and content narrative.

The output resulting from these considerations will help you craft a content strategy that can scale and produce content that can have a strong, positive impact on customer behavior—whether it’s selling more products, repositioning your company in its industry, or raising your company’s profile and its public perception.

I used to read the popular children’s book Love You Forever to both of my girls when they were little. Even thinking about it today, I still get choked up and emotional. Go ahead and call me a softy. What I remember most about the book is that it uses imagery to tell a significant part of the plot (as with most children’s books). The story is about a mother’s unconditional love for her son. It chronicles her son’s life growing from an infant to an adult and starting his own family. The sad conclusion shows how he reciprocates his love to his mother who has grown to be an elderly woman. There are just a few sentences on each page, but the story and illustration is powerful, and you can even follow along without actually reading the text.

This is how you should think about your content narrative. Visual storytelling is certainly top of mind for marketers today and something that consumers are demanding. With the rise of Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, and Facebook’s recent Timeline redesign, it’s even more important to keep your content narrative as simple and visual as possible.

1. Plan Your Story: Compendium can help you stay laser focused about the story you want to tell. From topics, timelines, tasks, and tracking to managing and growing your sources and library of original content, their platform can help you conceive, curate, and refine the story that makes you most appealing to your target audience.

2. Produce Your Story: Compendium helps you create a more effective story and provides workflows that help manage the content life cycle from beginning to end. With their StoryCapture feature, you can turn community conversations and customer stories directly into fresh content for your story, naturally.

3. Publish Your Story: Compendium offers a wide variety of templates, matching, or fully custom designs to ensure that your storytelling hub matches your brand and/or other online assets. Compendium hosts every site and handles all tech support.

4. Promote Your Story: With Compendium’s “from anywhere, to anywhere” approach, your content can be distributed in a multitude of social media channels, and they help you build a repository of content you can repurpose for the future.

5. Prove Your Story: Compendium keeps you up to speed on what your audience is responding to and how your content is performing with their measurement and reporting dashboard.

Following is a case study that illustrates how Compendium can help you solve your content challenges.

Cvent is the world’s largest provider of online event management, meeting site selection, and web survey software solutions. With four distinct product offerings, Cvent communicates differently with each of its target audiences through various marketing channels. They have an army of writers, content contributors, and editors who are responsible for feeding the content engine. To accomplish this task efficiently, Cvent needed tools with enterprise reliability to help guide writers to stay on message and to help administrators manage content with customizable workflows.

In the fall of 2008, Cvent launched a content hub (http://blog.cvent.com/) with Compendium, using two blogs to target their event planning and surveys offerings. Leveraging Compendium’s tools to help with content creation, moderation, and broadcasting, Cvent has since been able to launch two more blogs within their content hub—each targeted at a specific audience with specific goals (for example, thought leadership, brand awareness, lead generation). Features like Compendium’s Message Meter help Cvent’s 54 writers stay on message regardless of which of topics they are writing on. Meanwhile, Compendium’s moderation workflow feature allows Cvent’s six editors to create custom approval workflows for each blog, easing the editing process while assuring that every piece of content is proofread before being published. And all of this content is published on pages that are hosted in the cloud—ensuring that up time is reliable and page load speeds are optimal, no matter where their online visitors are located or how much traffic they get to their website.

With this content hub at the core of their content strategy, Cvent has been able to launch several targeted eNewsletters. Each newsletter is populated with the best performing content targeted for its unique audience. In addition, Cvent’s content is published on their social media channels using custom tracking. This allows Cvent to get more mileage out of their posts and to understand which content performs the best on each social channel.

Since the launch of their site, Cvent has been able to effectively and efficiently maintain their content hub, 54 authors, and six editors. They have published over 6,300 articles, experienced traffic increases of 175%, and seen an increase in sales-ready leads of 325% between 2010 and 2011. The hub contributed 5% of asset downloads and 1% of demo requests over the last year, with 60% of those coming since launching the new design. Most important, Cvent projects ad sales through its various blogs to reach $1 million in 2013.